Overview

The purpose of the Coversheets is to add a front and/or back covering page to a PDF document uploaded to an EPrints repository.

Coversheets work by using a user-defined Apache OpenOffice coversheet template uploaded to your EPrints repository. This template is then populated with the predefined attributes for the particular EPrint, before being attached to the front (or if specified, back) of any PDF documents uploaded for that EPrint. To do this a number of dependencies need to be installed:

PDFBox or Ghostscript: Either of these can be used to attach the coversheet to the rest of the PDF document.

Apache OpenOffice: This is used to open up the coversheet template, so that a coversheet for a particular EPrint can be created.

Perl Modules: Needed for EPrints to interact with OpenOffice.

The instructions below provide guidance on testing and using the Coversheets Bazaar package on an EPrints 3.3 repository running on either Debian or RedHat based Linux distributions. These instructions are intended to be sufficiently generic to be interpreted for use when installing on other Linux distributions.

Installing Dependencies

PDFBox or GhostScript

The Coversheets Bazaar package requires either PDFBox or GhostScript to attach the generated coversheet to the rest of the PDF document. For the more recent Linux distributions (e.g. Ubuntu 14.04+, Debian 7 and RedHat/CentOS 7) PDFBox is recommended as this is more reliable and robust, (i.e. it is less likely for a coversheet task to fail or take up a lot or resources for a long period of time). Using PDFBox or GhostScript on earlier versions of Linux may be difficult, it is likely any packages you may need to install may not be present by default or have different names because they are earlier versions.

PDFBox

Installing PDFBox requires Java to be installed. As root or with sudo this can be done by running the appropriate following command:

Now create the stitching Bash script that uses the PDFBox JAR file under the filename stitchPDFs in your archives bin/ directory and add the following (provided by Jonathan Green / University of Nottingham):

If you installed EPrints using the DEB or RPM package, it is likely many if not all of these packages will already be installed.

Oracle (Sun) Java is required to make use of the Coversheets package work with Ghostcript. By default this is not available in the standard package repositories of most Linux distributions. Follow the instructions below (as the root user or with sudo) to install Oracle (Sun) Java on your Linux distribution:

If you have not had to install any CPAN modules up to now, you may be prompted to configure CPAN before installing these modules, if so always choose the default options suggested.

For Archive::Zip it is recommended to use the specific version 1.30 tarball (as specified above). CPAN will download this specific tarball as part of the installation, like it would for non-version specific modules. The reason for using this specific version is, that as of at least 28th April 2015 the latest CPAN module has a bug, which means it does not work as required for EPrints Coversheet purposes.

Apache OpenOffice

Download the tarballed package of OpenOffice 3.4.1 for your Linux distribution. Later and some earlier versions of OpenOffice should work just as well but 3.4.1 is tried and tested. Then extract your DEB or RPM packages and install as root (or with sudo) using dpkg or rpm as appropriate.

N.B. For 32-bit versions remove '-64' from each of the lines above. You can check this by running the following command. If it returns something with '64' in it, it is 64-bit, if it does not, it is almost certainly 32-bit.

uname -i

Enabling Coversheets

Login to the EPrints Archive as an administrator and go to the Admin page and under the System Tools tab, click on EPrints Bazaar button.

On the EPrints Bazaar page scroll and click on Enable next to the OpenOffice Toolkit package.

If the OpenOffice Toolkit package installs successfully, click on Enable next the Coversheets package.

If the Coversheets package successfully installed. Click on the Admin link in the top menu bar and under the System Tools tab click on Start OpenOffice.

If you are us PDFBox, you will need to edit your archive's cfg/cfg.d/z_coversheets.pl file and change the $c->{gs_pdf_stitch_cmd} to the following

When the page reloads next click on Start Indexer, if t is not already started.

Coversheets should now be installed and ready to go. You can test this by following the instructions under Deploying Coversheets.

Deploying Coversheets

Logged in as an adminstrator, click on Manage records then Coversheets. If you cannot find the the Manage records link you can go straight to the list of coversheet records at (substituting example.eprints.org for the hostname of you EPrints repository):

Under the Coversheets page, click on Create New Coversheet. Fill in the Name and Description fields under Apply to checked the types you want to use a coversheet for.and set Priority to 1. If you wish to apply the coversheet to other types make sure they are checked as well.

Then, under Documents -> Front Page(s) upload the template coversheet front page, which you can adapt from the template at the URL below, before clicking Update button at the button of the page:

Designing your own Coversheet Template

Unfortunately, you cannot edit this in Microsoft Office as the document needs to be saved in .odt format.

Once you have opened the example coversheet template in OpenOffice or LibreOffice you can change the logos (images) used and the layout of the page as you choose fit.

Where a word is enclosed with ## either side (e.g. ##title##). Then this will be substituted with the appropriate EPrint attribute. By default the following tags can be put into a template coversheet to be replaced by the value for that EPrint attribute:

##title##

##type## (e.g. article, conference item, book section, etc.)

##url## (to the EPrint on your EPrints repository)

##date## (of when the EPrint was published)

##citation## (of the EPrint as it would appear in an EPrints search result)

##creators## (list of authors/editors of the EPrint)

##doi_url##

Once you have finished your design, before saving make sure you do not have any white space at the end of the document, as this may cause a blank page to be added between your coversheet and main document.

Tips and Tricks

Adding Extra Coversheet Tags

Extra coversheet tags can be added by editing z_coversheet_tags.pl under the archives cfg/cfg.d/ directory.

Configuring 'Apply to' Options

Additional options (e.g. eprint_status, userid, series, publication, etc.) can be added to the $c->{license_application_fields} in z_coversheet.pl under the archives cfg/cfg.d/ directory. This will cause these options to appear in the form for editing a particular coversheet.

Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting whilst Designing your own Coversheet Template

Adding and formatting tags on your Coversheet Template

Make sure when you add tags (e.g. ##title##) to your coversheet template you type the whole string in one go. Try to avoid copying and pasting tags about, especially avoid copying parts of tags. Also be careful when changing the formatting (e.g. font size, colour, etc.) of a tag, making sure you change the format for the whole tag. Not doing these things could lead to the underlying representing of the whole tag being broken up by styling elements, meaning that the coversheet package will not be able to find these tags to substitute them with the appropriate attribute from the EPrint. So when you come to look at the coversheet for your document, you will see the tag rather than the substituted attribute.